5 of the coolest vacant buildings in America by David Dudley on Oct 30, 2016, 2:28 PM Ah, to be a real estate developer at the dawn of the 21st century. The sweet tax breaks! The public scorn! Best of all, the endless opportunities to snap up and refurbish America’s many amazing vacant properties! If you’ve got a few million bucks to play with, you’ll find that the country is littered with remarkable empty structures in various states of disrepair, just waiting for enterprising new owners with big dreams and deep pockets. Here are five of our current faves. "Superman Building": Providence, Rhode Island  Built in 1928 as the Industrial Trust Building, this early Art Deco skyscraper has long been known locally as the Superman Building, thanks to a (mistaken) rumor that it served as the model of the home of the Daily Planet Building in the comics. Rising some 428 feet above downtown Providence, the 26-story office building is topped with a glowing green beacon in a decorative turret that does give it a certain Golden Age of Comics swagger. (During the 1973 energy crisis, the beacon was turned off to save electricity.) But the tallest tower in Rhode Island has proved to be a tough sell for High Rock Development, the LLC that bought the building for $33 million in 2008. The last tenant, Bank of America, left in 2013, and the Superman has been vacant ever since, though High Rock has a proposal to redevelop it into luxury apartmentswith ground-level retail. To help drum up support, the Providence Preservation Society is now leading a series of popular free public tours of the vacant icon.
Longaberger Building: Newark, Ohio  The Longaberger Company, makers of direct-marketed baskets and kitchen kitsch, was flying so high in the mid-1990s that they constructed a colossal basket-shaped building to serve as their corporate office. This proved unwise: Sales slowed, the company downsized, and now, well, there’s this empty seven-story basket to deal with, as my colleague Mark Byrnes marveled several months ago. Bloomberg recently checked in on the efforts sell the nearly-new structure and found it going for a bargain price of $5 million, or only $28 a square foot. The “essential basket-ness” of the building is, amazingly, not the biggest sales hurdle, area real estate experts say—it’s the remote location, some 40 miles outside of the nearest city, Columbus.
Martin Tower: Bethlehem, Pennsylvania  A similar spasm of corporate hubris much have possessed Bethlehem Steel in 1969, when the industrial behemoth began constructing a high-rise HQ that would utterly dominate the modest skyline of its hometown of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. A spare, stark International Style structure, the 21-story Martin Tower remains the tallest building in the Lehigh Valley, but Beth Steel is long gone: After posting record profits in the 1960s and ’70s, the steel giant collapsed into bankruptcy in 2001 and vacated the tower in 2003. Efforts to bring in new tenants have so far failed, and rezoning has opened the door to possible future demolition, despite the building’s inclusion (in 2010) on the National Register of Historic Places and the efforts of locals who love the place. Got a good idea to re-use it? Hit up the “Save Martin Tower” Facebook page.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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